e acabei de me lembrar de outra resposta, esta é a verdadeira resposta à sua pergunta.
se você tiver "ignorespace" no HISTCONTROL, então o bash não se lembrará de nenhuma linha que comece com um caractere de espaço. ele não aparecerá no histórico do shell atual, e muito menos ser salvo no $ HISTFILE.
por exemplo. Eu tenho export HISTCONTROL = 'ignoreboth: erasedups' no meu ~ / .bashrc
aqui estão os detalhes da página man bash:
HISTCONTROL A colon-separated list of values controlling how commands are saved on the history list. If the list of values includes ignorespace, lines which begin with a space character are not saved in the history list. A value of ignoredups causes lines matching the previous history entry to not be saved. A value of ignoreboth is shorthand for ignorespace and ignoredups. A value of erasedups causes all previous lines matching the current line to be removed from the history list before that line is saved. Any value not in the above list is ignored. If HISTCONTROL is unset, or does not include a valid value, all lines read by the shell parser are saved on the history list, subject to the value of HISTIGNORE. The second and subsequent lines of a multi- line compound command are not tested, and are added to the history regardless of the value of HISTCONTROL.